Golf - Henry Beard

As a serious player, a high handicapper, or simply a baffled onlooker to the awesome nonsense that is golf, have you ever wondered why, say, the golf balls have dimples, and the tee is both the thing you stick in the ground and the place you hit from, and the hole is so small, and the courses have all these big pits full of sand where any sane person would put grass?
Well, so did noted humour writer and avid hacker Henry Beard, who brought twenty-first-century computer search-engine technology to bear on this thousand-year-old game, tapping the internet's inherent capacity to confer a thin veneer of authenticity to far-fetched accounts of great moments in the history of golf, warped portraits of its legendary players, and fanciful conjectures about its origins and evolution.
Employing an easy-to-read and simple-to-fudge timeline format, he chronicles the amazing process through which this screwy pastime with wacky equipment and loony rules played for penny wagers by a bunch of bored-silly shepherds was gradually transformed into a screwy sport with wacky equipment and loony rules played for million-dollar purses by superstar athletes.
Here, then, in one convenient golf-bag-side-pocket-sized volume is a rich, wildly embroidered, ludicrously embellished tapestry of colourful fabrications and highly entertaining but thoroughly dubious speculations that tell the tall tale of golf - the game that deranged the world.